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webOS, Palm, Inc.'s prescient gesture-based smartphone operating system that made its way to an HP tablet and on to an untold number of LG smart TVs, has been open-sourced. For the second time. The first open source edition came from HP itself back in 2011, and according to Wikipedia went nowhere fast. Cut to 2018 and LG, the current custodian of webOS, has just announced an open source edition of their own. Hopefully this community build has received an update or two since the last one.

My own personal skepticism aside, the world can always use more open source software, so I honestly don't see this as bad news. But why webOS specifically, and why now? Here's the killer quote from LG's CTO:

“webOS has come a long way [...] and is now a mature and stable platform ready to move beyond TVs.”

... And potentially led her into another one. But we'll get to that later.

"Beautiful prison" is how The Verge's Nilay Patel describes Apple's iMessage. It's fairly accurate; for iPhone users Apple's default messaging app is as robust and feature-rich as any other platform—so much so that there's little reason to look beyond it. Even worse, those poor unenlightened souls who choose Android are treated as second-class citizens on iOS.

Don't believe me? Consider my 18 year-old niece, as loyal to Apple as any other first world millennial, who has on at least one occasion condescendingly referred to her uncle as a "green text".

She's currently taking her gap year in southeast Asia, and recently finished her first leg in Japan. While in Tokyo and Kyoto we stayed in touch via SMS—her uncle has been to that part of the world more than once, after all—but lost contact when she got a local SIM card; her iMessage seamlessly switched to a data connection but me, the green text, got locked out.

And then something unexpected happened: she texted me from Taipei and asked if we could keep in touch using some other messaging platform. Now I hardly think of myself as the most interesting man in the world, but you cannot deny that it's a pretty big deal for a teenage Apple fangirl to step outside the protective cocoon of iMessage just to keep in touch with little ol' me.

Unfortunately I seem to have led her straight into another proprietary messaging silo, otherwise known as WhatsApp. Despite being another walled garden I think it's the solution that makes the most sense for her current situation; in fact, all the 21st century digital nomads that I know depend on it for communications across borders and carriers. So I'm taking this one as a victory, if only for getting an iPhone user to see value in something outside the confines of Apple's beautiful prison.

I suspect that hardcore music enthusiasts who use Android will have already chosen their music streaming service; for anyone else thinking about which one is worth paying for, here's a summary of my own experiences with three popular apps.

Amazon Music
If you have Amazon Prime then you've also got Amazon Prime Music, the ad-free version of their streaming service. Their music catalogue seems fine, and the Android app can also cast to Android TV. Unfortunately their web player requires Flash, which tends to slow down my already taxed Chrome browser.

Google Play Music
If you want PC playback of your streaming music then Google is your obvious choice, with a web player that's optimized for Chrome and an Android app that effortlessly casts to Android TV. And if you wanted an ad-free YouTube experience then the paid version of Google Play Music would also be the obvious choice, as a subscription also includes YouTube Red. Unfortunately that perk is not yet available to those of us living in Canada.

Nonetheless, I took a 30-day free trial of Google Play Music, in the hopes that YouTube Red would one day make its way here. That would have been the end of the story, but my girlfriend suggested that I try out some other services before committing to GPM. That turned out to be some excellent advice.

Spotify
With some 70 million registered users Spotify is far and away the world's most popular music streaming service. They also offer a 30-day free trial, so I signed up with the intention of doing some A/B testing between Spotify and Google Play Music, and see if I could stump either one with a random music request.

The track that tipped the scales in favour of Spotify was this very random Japanese single that showed up in the girlfriend's YouTube feed. I'm guessing that it translates to The Futon Song...?

This past January saw two potential emergencies; one of them turned out to be a false alarm and the other never came to pass. And how the public was alerted about each one was very different.

The threat of a tsunami to coastal areas of B.C. was real, but as the CBC reported, getting the word out to residents was a challenge, with authorities relying on a "patchwork" of local alert systems. In stark contrast, the missile alert warning pushed to mobile phones of Hawaiian Islands residents a week earlier was both efficient and effective. And also, thankfully, a mistake.

A more efficient and effective alert system will soon be available to Canadians, hopefully without the human error. It's called Alert Ready and is powered by a technology called WPA—not the WiFi encryption standard but Wireless Public Alerting. This type of WPA is not just branding for text messages sent to your phone from a central authority; they are actually push notifications sent to devices in a specific area using cell broadcast distribution. For a device to be compatible it must meet three requirements:

Compatible with 4G LTE networks;
compatible with Wireless Public Alerting (WPA);
connected to an 4G LTE network when the emergency alert is issued.

Bell, Rogers and Telus have all begun notifying customers about the new service, which is expected to start rolling out across their networks starting April 6th. More details at the links directly below.

I found out via email yesterday that I was one of the 815,000 Canadian Uber users (along with some 57 million Americans) whose personal data was compromised. Here's an excerpt from the email I received:

In November 2016, Uber became aware that two individuals outside the company had accessed certain user data stored with a third-party service [...] The files that were accessed contained user information that we used to operate our services, and for nearly all users this included name, email address, and mobile phone number used on your account before 2016. Our outside forensics experts have seen no indication that trip location history, dates of birth, or payment information were accessed or downloaded.

Personally I'd have preferred to have my credit card number leaked rather than my email address and phone number, for the simple reason that my bank has much stronger protections in place against fraud than either my email provider or wireless carrier. Maybe that's just me.

What really stinks about this whole mess is that Uber didn't even want to notify affected Canadians at all. Mobile Syrup reports that the ride-sharing company was ultimately compelled to do so because of a February 28th ruling by the Alberta Privacy Commissioner. Uber plans to appeal that ruling, but there is a separate investigation being conducted by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

I don't expect every Uber user reading this to have the luxury of being able to delete their account; as a driver or passenger you might depend on the service. Fortunately I don't, but more importantly I no longer trust this company with my personal data.

With their users' credit cards already on file via the Google Play Store and Google Pay app, it only makes sense for the engineers in Mountain View to add peer-to-peer payment functionality to Android as well. But instead of doing this through a dedicated portal, they've chosen to implement this feature directly into the OS, through their own first-party software.

Using Google Pay, like PayPal , PayTM, or any other smartphone-based payments app of course requires that both the sender and recipient are registered users of the specific app in question. And while I can appreciate the convenience of these apps for sending money to family and friends overseas, for P2P payments within my own country I'm almost certainly going to go with an email transfer directly from my bank.

Famous phone leaker Evan Blass has, for the moment, turned his prying eyes to smartwatches and has come up with this, the Fitbit Versa. It's not the first time we've seen this newer, cheaper and less fugly version of the Ionic. Nine days ago Wareable posted a gallery of the then-unnamed device; they've since updated their post to include the new information from Blass.

Available in black, charcoal, rose gold and silver, the Versa will run the same Fitbit OS as the Ionic, but in a smaller and more female-friendly form factor. It will be water resistant to 50mm and, like the Ionic, will include an SpO2 sensor able to monitor sleep apnea once Fitbit enables that feature. The one thing it won't have on its spec sheet is GPS.

If you think the Versa bears more than a passing resemblance to the Pebble Time Steel you're not wrong. In fact, someone told Wareable that Pebble had a touchscreen watch in development before they were bought up by Fitbit.

The Versa is expected to go on sale this spring, and will almost certainly retail for less than the $300 USD Ionic.

This isn't a screenshot of Android P, but it might as well be. The image is actually from the Play Store listing for the Flux White Substratum Theme. I was a big fan of the original Flux for Cyanogen not so long ago, and Google could certainly do worse than to copy this particular designer's fine efforts.

Feel free to compare what you see above with some screenshots of the actual developer preview from Android Police. The resemblance is uncanny, isn't it? It's also perhaps a little bit ironic, because according to XDA custom overlays—including Substratum themes—can no longer be used with Android P, at least in its current state.

The last time I had checked on Substratum it required root, but apparently there is also a rootless variant. It doesn't ultimately matter because root access to your device won't help you anyway, thanks to changes Google has made to a file called framework.jar

Custom ROMs will likely be able to patch this file, and there might soon be a Magisk module that does the same. But if you're running a stock ROM that doesn't already support theming, prepare to be blinded by Android P.

What I'm talking about here is gesture-based navigation, currently all the rage on the latest fruit phone. As luck would have it, it's also an option on the latest Open Beta of OxygenOS for the OnePlus 5T—the one without the capacitive buttons and front-facing fingerprint sensor / home button. Here's a close-up of my current home screen running the beta:

Notice the complete absence of software navigation buttons. It doesn't seem like such a big deal at first, but it very quickly makes my FHD+ screen feel bigger and the entire OS more modern. A few more examples:

Here's what typing looks like with the navigation buttons enabled...

... And here's what it looks like without. To be fair, a dark background behind the navigation buttons would make them look a lot better, but still not nearly as elegant as not having them at all.The gestures themselves are intuitive enough that they'll very quickly become second nature. Here's all you need to know:

Home screen - swipe up from bottom-centre and release;App switcher - swipe up from bottom-centre and hold;Go back - swipe up from bottom-left or bottom-right and release.

If still unclear, here are the gestures in action, courtesy of Droid Life:

I wouldn't yet call it perfect on the OnePlus. If you've never seen the navigational aid that Apple has on their iPhone X, it's a thin black strip at the bottom of the screen from which you can begin your swipe upwards. On the 5T there's no such aid, and swiping successfully can sometimes take a couple of tries. Yet I am convinced that this is a much better way to get around your phone. Hopefully this feature will make it to a stable build of OxygenOS, and to other Android phones as well.

If you frequent either Amazon.ca or Amazon.com you'd be forgiven for thinking that they were already here. But China's number two smartphone OEM has plans far beyond grey market imports; according to the Wall Street Journal they're planning to raise up to a hundred billion dollars in an IPO on U.S. markets, and shortly afterwards will start selling their Android-powered phones and other gear through an official North American sales channel.

Based on Huawei's recent troubles I wouldn't expect any carrier partners for Xiaomi phones, either; fortunately there's not so much sticker shock when it comes to their hardware, so carrier financing and/or subsidies aren't as critical to sales. That's my big hope here, that Xiaomi will have enough success with sub-$1,000 devices that Samsung, Google and Apple will take notice.

Apple in particular might also take notice of MIUI, the inspired-by-iOS ROM developed at a time when other versions of Android lacked polish. But there are plenty of other Android OEMs also blatantly copying iOS, and they haven't been sued yet. We'll have to wait and see, I guess.

By the way, the WSJ source lives behind a paywall, and my Google search trick to break it no longer seems to work. Fortunately, a helpful redditor on r/Android has done us all a favour and copy/pasted the text of the article right here.

I've been getting a lot of SMS spam lately (2-3 per day) from what appears to be the same source since the content of the messages are similar. The problem is that I can't block them by number since...